mspanners wrote:No the stupidest casting was David Jason as Rincewind....... so there!

Full agreement, mspanners!

I disagree. The only issue I have with David Jason playing Rincewind was that he was too damn old to play the role. Other than that, he had Rincewind's character down, or at least one interpretation. Hell, I was half-hearing Jason and half-hearing Eric Idle while reading Interesting Times.

The good news: a film based on one of the great Jack Reacher books by Lee Child is really going to happen, after years and years of development on various titles in the series that will number 16 novels when The Affair is released this fall. The bad news (perhaps): Jack Reacher, written as a six and a half-foot, sandy-haired slab of a man, will definitely be played by Tom Cruise in Christopher McQuarrie‘s One Shot

Its going to cost a fortune to produce..... All those apple crates for him to stand on. Or is the supporting cast all midgets.

The Collective Brain: The synoptic serendipity that comes when interesting thoughts from interesting and interested people get together. And the whole is always more than the sum of its parts.

DaveC wrote:Rosamund Pike is the female lead with Cruise in One Shot - why are they doing the 9th book first. I haven't read any of the so I don't know the stories or character. Is it a good jumping in point?

The books don't really need to be read in succession (except maybe a couple make more sense if you do). Reachers background, and the reason why he's a drifter, is brought up in every book. One shot is not the best Reacher story in my opinion, but I guess they have their reasons for making that into a movie first.
I refuse to see the film if Cruise is playing Reacher though, that'll ruin the whole thing for me.

There were no public health laws in Ankh-Morpork. It would be like installing smoke detectors in Hell.
- Feet of clay.

I'm pretty sanguine about the idea of a normal to slightly-below-average height person playing Reacher. If you restrict the casting call to actors who meet with the height given to the character in the novels, you'll end up with either Steven Merchant or Wladimir Klitschko playing the part and, frankly, I don't think either of those two would nail it.

I'm far more concerned with the fact Tom Cruise hasn't played a decent part in anything since, oof, probably Magnolia. Well, a decent major role; to be fair to him, he was brilliant and hilarious as Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder.